The 4000% spike that the cryptocurrency market doesn’t need

Crypto malware is on the rise – and it’s now targeting your camera too…

There’s been a lot of red ink around the cryptocurrency marketplace across the last six to eight weeks, with the majority of numbers in the sector – save for the last day or two – going down rather than up.

Now though comes a number that’s very much gone in the opposite direction – not that anybody wants it to.

The new quarterly report from McAfee Labs (that’s unrelated these days, of course, to controversial cryptocurrency advocate John McAfee) has revealed that there’s been a dramatic rise in cryptocurrency malware over the past year, to the tune of over 4000%.

And there’s more, er, terrific news, too.

As per the report, cryptocurrency mining malware is now targeting a broader spectrum of Internet of Things (IoT) devices on top of standard user computers. These include relatively low power devices such as video recorders and cameras, that are web connected and tend to have precious little security enabled. It’s the latter factor that makes them so tempting to nefarious types. That they know the technology concerned is of little power on its own. But if thousands of said IoT devices share the same crypto jacking malware, then the brute force of them is not without impact.

The headline figure, though, remains that cryptocurrency mining malware as a whole has grown by 4,467% according to the report since the start of the year. It’s boom time for hackers and malware writers in the sector at the moment, and there’s little sign of that trend arresting.